John D. MacDonald

In all emotional conflicts, the thing you find the most difficult to do, is the thing that you should do."--Meyer's Law

We were about to give up and call it a night when somebody threw the girl off the bridge.

I am wary of the whole dreary deadening structured mess that we have built into such a glittering top-heavy structure that there is nothing left to see but the glitter, and the brute routines of maintaining it.

It's a tricky, complex, indifferent society, Puss. It's a loophole world. And there are a lot of clever animals who know how to reach through the loopholes and pick the pockets of the unsuspecting.

Integrity is not a conditional word. It doesn't blow in the wind or change with the weather. It is your inner image of yourself, and if you look in there and see a man who won't cheat, then you know he never will.

Friendships like marriages are dependent on avoiding the unforgivable.

At times it seems as if arranging to have no commitment of any kind to anyone would be a special freedom. But in fact the whole idea works in reverse. The most deadly commitment of all is to be committed only to one's self. Some come to realize this after they are in the nursing home.

Education is something which should be apart from the necessities of earning a living, not a tool therefor. It needs contemplation, fallow periods, the measured and guided study of the history of man's reiteration of the most agonizing question of all: Why?

When you see the ugliness behind the tears of another person, it makes you take a closer look at your own.

When you look at pictures of people you know are dead, there is something different about the eyes. As if they anticipated their particular fate.It is a visceral recognition. I told myself I was getting too fanciful and went to bed.

Please not yet. Those are the three eternal words. Please not yet.

It is one thing to look at a mistreated boat and another to look at a tomb. The silence of the bay seemed more intense. And I could see the glint of the carrion flies.

A woman who does not guard and treasure herself cannot be of very much value to anyone else.

Vulnerability is the curse of the thinking classes.